A Bitcoin miner made more money powering DOWN during the 2023 Texas heat wave than it made mining. The no-bullshit version of the energy debate.

Energy is the objection everyone hits first, and most of what gets repeated is somewhere between stale and rhetorically engineered. Some of it is correct. Here is the honest version.

The number: Bitcoin draws about 173 TWh a year, roughly 0.75% of global electricity (Cambridge CBECI, 2025). It is a lot.

The comparison trick: "More than Argentina" (true, built to alarm). "Less than the world's tumble dryers" (true, built to soothe). "More than gold mining"; depends entirely on how you count gold, whose own estimates run 132 to 265 TWh and straddle Bitcoin's number. Every comparison is a chosen denominator, and the denominator is doing the arguing.

The energy is the security: Proof-of-work converts electricity into the cost of rewriting history. The energy bill is not overhead on the security; it is the security. "Make Bitcoin use less energy" is the same sentence as "make Bitcoin cheaper to attack."

What miners actually buy: A miner is the only industrial-scale electricity buyer that is location-agnostic, interruptible in seconds, and indifferent to when the power arrives. So it migrates to power nobody else can use: stranded hydro, flared methane, curtailed wind. It is not virtue; stranded electrons are just the cheapest electrons on earth.

The receipt: August 2023, Texas heat wave: Riot Platforms earned $31.7M mostly for powering DOWN (selling pre-bought power back to the grid + demand-response credits) versus $8.9M of bitcoin mined that month, curtailing 95%+ of its load in seconds. The load everyone calls a hog is the one that hands capacity back when the grid is about to break. Riot was driven by self interest, not virtue.

What the critics get right: The Granbury, TX noise lawsuit is real and believable to anyone who has stood next to an air-cooled mining container; not all mining runs on stranded renewables (some grids burn coal and gas); the water and e-waste critiques deserve straight answers, not reflexive "FUD." The strong forms of the critique have answers. The weak forms get called FUD because they don't.

The fallacy to retire: "Each transaction uses X kWh" is a stock-and-flow error. Mining energy secures the entire ledger and is set by price and the block subsidy, not by how many transactions flow through. Per-transaction energy is unknowable and shrinking; it measures nothing.

Full rabbit hole, fully sourced, no bullshit: https://www.learnbitcoin.com/rabbit-hole/energy

Happy to argue any of it in the comments - with real numbers.